


In the Country of Unsent Letters

by Khazar222



Series: In The Aftermath [3]
Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, Warcraft II, Warcraft III, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Apocalypse, Azeroth, Darnassus, Desert, Elf, Goblin - Freeform, Human, Kalimdor, Night, Night Elf, Orc, Original Character-centric, Post-Apocalypse, Silithus, Troll - Freeform, Warcraft - Freeform, dark troll, haunted, jungle troll, old world, tauren - Freeform, vanilla wow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-23
Updated: 2013-08-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 08:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/938039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khazar222/pseuds/Khazar222
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a lonely quarter, years past, a nation died. They left only words. Silence swallowed up the desert once more. Unto it: two wanderers, carrying memory between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Country of Unsent Letters

**Author's Note:**

> "kenopsia n. the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs." - John Koening, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, http://goo.gl/KLwq89
> 
> A rover and surveyor pass over diatomaceous plains. They will leave their mark on that wide and quiet country, as it marks them. A story about the gulfs of silence between people, and the ways they try to fill them. A critical response to Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian." Informed by: Images, stories, and footage of the ongoing conflict in northern Mali. The essay "The Muscular Female Body Under Scrutiny," by dysmorphia. The novel "Midnight Robber," by Nalo Hopkinson.
> 
> Beta by the inimitable Witticaster Cole.
> 
> Suggested Listening: Carolina Chocolate Drops - Snowden's Jig ; Tinariwen - Lulla ; Baterdene - The Gallop of Jonon Khar

\--1--

They met on the road. Somewhere, on the road.

He was going to and coming from, fleeing someplace and trying to find someplace else. He was disappearing with a part of himself, or trying to find some missing piece. He would always remember the moment clearly, but not the times or places before and after.

Stepping out of the grey-green fog that hung below the tree-line headachey with the smell of dawn and the roasting livingness of the jungle. The tar-black lip of a volcanic cliff-face looming overhead. The world extended outward only as far as the impenetrable tree-line and the shroud of mist, and the flat black bruteness of the volcanic cliff.

Overturned carts and bodies and the bodies of livestock. She was picking over them, absconding with jewelry and rich fineries, draping it over her tusks and between the joins of her armor. Whether or not she was the cause of that destruction or had merely stumbled upon it seemed beyond answering—it was as if he had happened upon her in stasis, that she had always been there, decorating herself with heirlooms from the dawn of time, until his intrusion interrupted something sacred and eternal.

He was not afraid because he felt so alone there, with her, unstuck from the world, gone where whatever happened would not matter back in the real. She rotated towards him, swiveling on her waist, leaning forward, jutting; intruding like the long-legged predator birds of the open plains.

"I found it first," she said, showing her teeth. Voice the sound of crumbling bones.

He’d seen trolls before, but she was one of another nature, called up from inarticulate bad dreams scarcely remembered. Huge and hugely rough, with skin the color of a rich darkened bruise and stamped with tattoos gone to mush. As tall and wide as a chapel door and taller still with a pig-greased crest of hair, dyed and braided in delirious vomit-colors looking like poisoned seaweed. Yellow-shot eyes as big as fists bearing down on gummed-up black tear ducts. Tusks, each as long as his arms and studded in bangles and armlets and broaches and circlets worth a jeweler’s fortune and wrapped all up in a cross-bar of spikes like those strung between the teeth of war-mammoths.

He could only think of the skeleton in the Grand Museum, how huge it had been, that animal, and remembered the black hole in the center of its skull. For a brief moment he thought that antediluvian power had come back for him, to meet there, beneath the brute black cliff. He stood very still.

"I don’t want any of it."

"Good." She returned to her scavenging.

"Only I haven’t got any money."

She turned away and started digging through a collapsed wagon. He saw that she was armed with a warclub in the shape of a gunstock that stood nearly twice as tall as himself, made of ironoak or hornbeam, with a spearpoint affixed at the elbow and lacquered with a dull black varnish that seemed to have the consistency of tar.

"I said: I haven’t got any money."

"I heard you."

"If you were planning on robbing me, or killing me." He’d been robbed before. It seemed absurd to accost anyone in that place; he suspected that if either of them were to come to harm, the other would be trapped forever.

She frowned, jangling the loose bracelets on her tusks. "Why would I do that?"

"If I had valuables."

"Do you have any valuables?"

"No."

"Then what good would that do me?"

"Some highwaymen kill for the sake of it."

"Oh," she said, sounding bored.

"Some are also cannibals."

She had discovered a golden gown of surpassing craftsmanship unmarred in the smoldering wreck. She shook the dust out of it and held it up, examining it critically. "Do you think I’m a cannibal?"

"I don’t rightly know either way."

"Well, why would you assume that?" She hitched up her breastplate and jammed the dress in her belt like a sash. Tin-pot armor liberated from a dozen other occupants, perhaps protesting, perhaps not, and lashed together into something like a wearable furnace. Burning inside, like slow, brown lava.

"I don’t know."

"Then you wouldn’t have said it."

"I’ve been told that trolls eat people."

"People eat people. Lions eat their offspring. People bury their dead and plant gardens and eat of the vine that grows from them, so eventually all are consumed."

"That’s very philosophical."

"Do you think I am going to eat you because of the way I look?" She was on him in two quick strides, towering overhead breath like a carnivore and her pores stinking with grease and smoke. "Do I scare you?"

"I suppose so, yes." He squinted.

"Who told you trolls eat people?"

"Other people."

She snorted and turned back to her work. He sat down on the ground. "I like your tusks," he said.

She stopped, began to turn, did not, and went on digging through the carriage-cart. "Thank you."

He watched her process the flotsam, disturbing and avoiding this and that based on some personal standard, gradually setting the carts upright and piling the bodies onto the burning wagon that could not be used otherwise. With the remaining trappings she had gathered, she fashioned a wine-red dress into a jaunty scarf, and tore and jammed the rest in the joins of her elbows, her tusks jangling in their luster. She sat down on the ground with an empty-drum thud.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

He dragged his fore- and middle-fingers over the dirt. "Wherever."

"What are you?"

"A surveyor."

"Is that true?"

Something far off in the distance rumbled.

"What are you?"

She thought about it. "I’ve been called a ‘rover,’ once."

He nodded.

She adjusted the cross-bar on her tusks so that it was not level with her eyes. "I am Sobek."

"Fen."

Neither would later remember who spoke first, her or him, or perhaps it was that place itself, ushering them away.

"We should get going."

"Yes."

The rover and surveyor went out into the desert together.

They emerged from the steaming barrier of the jungle onto the high hills that swept down to the white expanse.

The humid pall that clung to him clipped the memories down to still frames—the cliff—the hilltop—and the briefness of the long trek down the northern roads out into the desert and to the only habitation in that abandoned corner of the world: the Hold.

The Hold had a name, once, but so much of it had been weathered away that the name had gone with it, too, disappeared somewhere in the sand. It rose a squat black turret stuck up in the middle of the dunes at the confluence of broken highways leading outward like a Y. An elven fortress, retrofitted and built upon over centuries; siege and time multiplying layers of scar tissue, a teetering acropolis of trash and people. At the height of the war with the insects it held the assembled armies of both Alliance and Horde and with the conclusion of that campaign the swollen fortress emptied down to skeleton crews and the refuse returned. No longer a fortress; merely a node of trading. Whole wings closed off and left to dust. People came and went, travelers on the long continental south road, swinging wide of the fighting in the lands of the great interior. Few stayed long, vibrating in anticipation of something, they hurried on, evaporating into the haze above the horizon, gone from out of the world. Apparitions, rejected by the Hold. The Hold was alone.

 

\--2--

 

They were met by a single guard patching holes on the long causeway that led up to the northeast gate. He told them the Watch Commander was in his habitations, and that they ought to see him for their assignments, mistaking them for some other party.

Inside, they discovered the long central yards that split the Hold between the Watch-Keep and the larger structure that dominated the bluff: the true Hold itself. She said something about selling wares and told him to go see the Commander as suggested, and he set off for the iron gates of the Keep.

 

\--3--

 

He presented himself to the Commander and handed over his writ of surveyance. It said: "Surveyor; Authorized to Make Forays into the Desert Interior. Wages and Expenses Standard to Joint Operations Task Command."

The paper was official, the stamp and the original statement certified by persons of authority. But it had somehow escaped, a strand of legalese gone feral out in the wild. In possessing it he was possessing a crime, holding the ball of it in his hand. If it had been torn up or lost or washed out to sea the crime would have been erased, but as long as that paper existed with intent, crouching on the table, it was red-hot, the Watch Commander's nose hovering millimeters above its vibrating core. There would be havok the moment he sensed it. Would he recognize the faint embossment of the newer script appended below the signature: an allotment of wages for one (1) bodyguard for the aforementioned surveyor?

He stood sweating in the unventilated chamber, a shaft of muddy orange sunlight heating his ankle, afraid to move, for movement would betray the lie.

The Watch Commander traced the bottoms of each line with a finger. With a pinched expression he placed the writ atop one of dozens of stacks of paper rising about his cramped office like decaying forest strata.

"You'll want to find some lodgings up in the Hold. Check with the supply officer about wages tendered. See about getting a flare, too, for when you're in the interior; though don't expect a rescue unless there's patrols in eyesight and we've men to spare."

And so that was it.

He rejoined her in the yards where passersby had spread news of a strange scene: a massive troll had presented itself among the sellers of the bazaar and was bartering all manner of heirlooms and artifices that she plucked from the recesses of her boiler armor like mites or barnacles.

"Eighteen, eighteen!" she shouted, shaking a silver candelabra over the head of a fearful-looking trader. "Eighteen! Anything less is highway robbery!"

Inhabitants and soldiery had come creeping crablike from the coral pores of the Hold to watch this new delirium, and gradually she had sold every article to one trader or another and was done.

She had cupped in her wide palm an assortment of clumped banknotes endemic to those cities adopting paper money and for the rest a motley collection of coinage from every corner of the continents. Her tusks had lost some of their garnish and where bangles had long been hooked there were now light bands so that both protrusions looked vaguely like tattooed limbs. She grinned down at him in the shade of the citadel.

"You undersold," he said.

"What's that?"

"You undersold everything. You could have made double or more."

She laughed. "Let's go drink."

 

\--4--

 

The Stoop was the only watering hole in the Hold. Buffed-out cracks in the floor betrayed the places where walls had been knocked out to accommodate a larger footprint. With so few people and so little to do the Stoop became the gathering place for all personnel and business, official and unofficial, legitimate and illegitimate. It was the place where everyone ended up, and where you went to find anyone you needed; eventually, you began to understand that if you needed something, you went to the Stoop, and if someone needed something from you, whether you knew it or not, it was best to be there anyway.

Those few veterans who'd been stationed there since the war talked about the Stoop in reverent tones, and the attitude filtered down into the constantly cycling ranks. It was the closest thing to the comforts of civilization the Hold offered. Critically, it was cool, buried deep down in the center of the fortress, and, more critically, had no windows to remind anyone of what was outside.It was also where the prostitutes congregated.

Where everyone else saw the comforts of habitation, Cooper saw Step One.

The Hold was owned by the Joint Operations Task Command and so she did not buy it outright—only the right to barter alcohol therein. The decor stayed mostly the same: ramshackle booths of antique elven lounges, long tables carved out of caravan siding, silithid trophies arranged all along the walls, their huge insect jaws leering down from above. Prizes of the war; heads of the enemy. Slowly, she added glass-bottle chandeliers, balconies, stairwells. Everything was cleaned, fixed, or replaced outright, but there was no betrayal of "newness." She took her time—a new set of stools here, a better privy there—letting the place shift beneath their feet. No one knew where she came from, or how she'd come to be there, and by the time anyone noticed she'd always been, and always would be.

Officially, the Watch Commander was in charge of the Hold; yet after the war all positions became temporary, the desert the punishment of the too-young and too-old and too-volatile. As the men and women of the Watch churned in and out over the years, the lifeblood remained: builders, smiths, nightworkers, cooks, maids, and all the rest--itinerant though many of them were. And as the Watch ran their sorties and kept the world safe from the specter of the insects, Cooper gathered the livelihood of the Hold under her control. Renting rooms, digging new wells, running piping through the walls. Many on both sides of the aisle were retiring to refurbished rooms and wings to start families.

Enduring rumor said she was a witch, or perhaps even a demon in corporeal form. No one had ever seen her do any magic, and to some that lack of evidence was the evidence. But Cooper was a sorcerer of another nature: one who understood the magic in messages. Cooper made people think and those thoughts kept being thought, even when people weren't thinking them—and soon everyone was thinking about nothing but Cooper, and Cooper was free to think about everything else, sitting quietly in her brackish appearance with her notebooks, writing, watching, and planning.

It was to this that the rover and surveyor arrived.

 

\--5--

 

The rover turned over all her profits to the bartender and instructed them to open a tab. When they asked for a name, she grunted, "The troll," and lurched off to one of the high tables and the surveyor followed after her.

Someone had left a pence novel on the table and he took to reading while she began, slowly and laboriously, to drink as much liquor as possible.

Two hours passed and he'd drank little, though she seemed in no way inebriated, save for the strong smell that clung to her. As evening dragged on the Stoop began to fill and he tried to parse the comings and goings.

One in particular stood out. Where every other patron had entered from the front doors, one came in from the kitchen shutters: a pale blue elf woman in a tweed jacket and sickly-green dress, wearing ponderous black boots and spectacles. Her age was indeterminate. She sat at the terminus of the bar on a rather more elegant, backed stool than all the rest, and produced a ledger in which she began scribbling furiously, pencil jammed between ring and smallest finger, her onion-knot of mildew-colored hair bobbing as she labored.

She was Cooper.

 

\--6--

 

Well past sunset the Stoop had filled to capacity and it seemed to the surveyor louder and more cacophonous than any barroom he'd ever experienced; three bands on three levels fought for dominance of the air and the voices grew louder and louder, chanting away the desert outside.

Close to midnight a quartet of soldiers approached the table. Crude chevaliers in Watch armor, but with the look of mercenaries. The man leading them, bald with fish tattoos upon his scalp, spoke pointedly.

"This is my table you're sitting at."

Lording grotesquely huge above them, even sitting, the rover did not immediately respond. She spoke something slurred in a foreign language, thick with glottal stops.

The man jammed a finger into the table edge. "You were bartering just this morning, so don't feign idiot."

The surveyor was seating nearly at the edge of the couch, and as the rover rattled on in her chopping language the closest soldier, a gnoll, leaned over to him and spoke quietly. "Mind your company, boyo. Marlin is right to distrust this one."

"I didn't ask you."

"That's no thing I'd call friend. Dark troll, black troll. From places no feet have ever walked."

"—quit your damn ignorance!" The man called Marlin was set to crawl across the table.

"You don't know what you're testing, boyo," the gnoll continued.

"Fen," she suddenly interrupted, loud and clear above the roar of the bar. The bands stopped playing. The din subsisded. In the corner of his eye the surveyor saw the elf at the counter, watching.

"I'm having difficulty making myself understood to this savage. Translate: Tell this little rooster that if he keeps cawing, I will twist his skull off."

"Degenerate, cock-brained she—"

The slap was still echoing back after he hit the floor. She did not stand or lean; merely swung. The others of the quartet jumped back, and from his corner seat the gust of wind dried the surveyor's eyes. The face of the man called Marlin warped and he was unmoving.

"Tell them not to bother me again."

The others looked at the elf woman at the bar. She went back to her ledger. The three gathered up the man and made for the front door. The gnoll gave him a last, poisonous look before they left. Gradually, the music returned and the buzz of the place reignited, but he'd lost any appetite for drink.

"Going to sleep."

She nodded, barely, staring straight ahead.

The moment he left the Stoop he felt a light touch on his shoulder. He spun and threw out his hands. "Don't shoot."

The stately draenei in red robes covered her mouth and chuckled. "I haven't a gun?"

"My mistake."

She pressed her hands together as though in prayer. "Cooper would like to have a word with you, if you would be so kind."

"Who?"

"The owner of the establishment you just departed."

"I didn't hit anybody."

"That man," she said, "is a soldier of the Watch."

"He started it."

"He may not survive the night."

He flexed his toes in his boots. "Lead the way."

 

\--7--

 

"Mr. Fen. So good of you to drop by."

Cooper was a small, severely compact woman of compact manners. Her office was a masterclass in low-level tension, desk raised above the guest chair a few hairs, the back wall covered in clocks—spinning, clicking, a dozen mounted in a sort of rainbow behind her. He found it immediately and continuously difficult to maintain eye contact. Present on her desk were the component parts of her whole diet: whiskey, hard tack, and a cube of pungent, concrete dwarven cheese.

"I didn't give my name."

"You gave it when you entered this community."

"She was just defending herself."

"I appreciate your distaste for small talk. Have a seat," she said, still scribbling madly in the huge tome laid out before her. It was an incomprehensible list of lists that made him nauseous just to look at. "And no, she wasn't. I was there."

"He was about to draw his sword."

"Rampant speculation, Mr. Fen."

"Fen is fine. Are you the second-in-command?"

She regarded him with a twisted-up smile. "Yes. Yes, I am the civic administrator of this community. You may call me Cooper."

"Is that a title?"

"Why not?"

"The draenei said you own the bar."

"Everything here is property of Joint Operations Task Command," she said.

"Even the prostitutes?"

Her pencil halted with a metallic scrape. "Absolutely, positively, no."

"I apologize."

"None necessary."

"Are you going to hang her?"

"Hm? Who?"

"My bodyguard."

She blinked. "For what? Oh, the incident?" She pressed her pencil carefully into the crease of the ledger, the tip pointing at his forehead. "I don't think we could build a gallows strong enough. Besides, you're a loyal citizen. A card-carrying surveyor."

"That was official JO-Tic correspondence for Watch eyes only."

"Yes, it was."

"Yes."

"Which guild?"

"Hm?" He crossed his legs and clasped his knee.

"Which Archaeological and Mineralist guild are you contracted to? Vogot? Spinoza? Redwhistle?"

"Redwhistle."

"Schooled in Menethil, then?"

"Eight years."

"Redwhistle is a Tanaris guild."

"They sent me abroad for apprenticing."

"Redwhistle only hires fellows. No apprentices."

In that moment the tick of the clocks was appallingly skeletal.

"This is embarrassing."

"I can imagine," she said.

"I invoke the law."

"Which law?"

"Whichever one gets me out of this."

She produced a large blue handkerchief and used it to wipe condensation from her liquor glass. "I have a job I'd like you to do for me."

"I'm on Watch wages."

"How much do you make on that grocer's stipend?"

He told her.

She rubbed her chin. "A fine sum."

"How much are you offering?"

She told him.

"This has to be a ruse."

"You're paranoid."

"What if I'm some kind of spy or, or assassin sent here to kill you?"

"I don't know, are you?"

"Does it seem plausible?"

"Not especially, no."

"Damn."

She tucked the handkerchief in her collar where it protruded like a limp blue fin and pulled something out of a box drawer. It was a very old document, more wood pulp than paper, bearing a column of tight, looping letters running down the center of the page. At the bottom were a collection of waxy stamps brittle to every bend.

"Recognize this lettering?"

"High Kaldorei."

"Correct. Old language, very hard to read but recognizably distinct."

"Yes."

"This is a deed."

"All right."

"You are a surveyor. You are going to be surveying the old ruins of this land. Are you not?"

"Considering recent events I am concerned over this course of action."

She went on: "I want you to look for papers that look like this. Any papers, any and all—you are to find them, and bring them back to me."

"Danger?"

"Next to none."

"Why me?"

"Because I believe I know you," she said. "You have nowhere to be, nowhere to go, and are worried that someone might take notice. You have the company of a very dangerous person and so an aptitude for self-preservation, and you would like very much like to avoid further trouble."

"Why not someone else?"

"Because the migrants who travel through this place are obviously unsuitable for such a venture, and the inhabitants I do have are either indisposed to such activity, unreliable, criminal, or, in the majority, superstitious nitwits." She picked her pencil out of the crease. "You bring the deeds to me and no one else. Only you and your bodyguard are to know about this. Payment for each one rendered at the time of completion."

"Understood."

"You have a good day now. And welcome to the Hold."

The office door opened and the draenei stood without. As he crossed the threshold, Cooper spoke once more without looking up. "And please speak to your troll about taking the necessary steps to ensure her standing is not further tarnished in my establishment. This is her first warning." The last two words snapped at his neck with a chill finality that chased him all the way to his quarters and into sleep.

 

\--8--

 

They went out into the desert to find letters from the dead.

To those familiar with the scrub and badland of the equatorial regions it was an unwelcome surprise, and to those familiar with the emptiness of the seas it was faintly remembered. But nothing could capture the desert country called on some maps "Silithus," former homeland of the silithid, because it had no comparison.

It crawled up the southern foothills like creeping mold, threatening to grind down the mountains and advance on the rest of the continent. The pale white calcium carbonate of billions of tiny former lives. The thought that it terminated at all points, eventually, was of little comfort to the person standing in the middle of that alien expanse, that plain seemingly dumped out of the sky onto an unsuspecting land, swallowing up a whole corner of the continent; a vast, dessicated organism entombing the ground beneath.

Silent: total, encompassing, enveloping. So silent he could hear the blood in his veins. Even the wind lost its voice.

They began to ransack the old manors that stood gleaming dead atop the bluffs. They invaded a palace at the edge of an escarpment in the north and found it already stripped of the plainest treasures of metal and gems, but that was not the prize. He went through old drawers methodically, slowly, careful for snakes and scorpions.

From the floors above he heard constant banging that would have unnerved him if he had not known it was only the rover; in the weeks since beginning their sojourns they'd only tendered watchtowers and old abandoned compounds from the war, and her love of fine cast-offs had been sorely underserved.

Cooper had told him that she could not convince any Watch-soldier to take up her bounty because they feared—especially among the elves and orcs—that the old manors were haunted by vengeful spirits of the dead, but he had seen no signs of life except for the birds and mice now inhabiting luxury.

He found several scrolls that resembled what he was looking for and then went looking for her, following the noise. He found her in a parlor with fluted white columns. Black burns in the shape of leaves, where the gilding had been ripped from the walls, surrounding a faded mural of worldly creation.

She was lounged on a couch protruding from a heap of long-burnt furniture with the skeletons of two elves in long white dresses heinously gathered under her arms. Her collar was all stopped up with a fabric that glowed like pearls, and crammed down over her mohawk was a circlet of opals. She'd discovered a dusty jug of wine somewhere and was draining it between taking shots at mosaics on the wall with pieces of rubble.

"Fen! Have you met my friends Abbetha and Trinel?" She shook the skeletons.

"For gods' sakes, this is a tomb."

"Only elves, foul little elves. Eight hundred points I get the eye." One of the mosaic faces came apart under the impact.

"I found what we need. Let's get going."

"Careful, Abbetha. I think he might like you."

"Stop doing that to them."

She scrunched up her face. "Fine." The skeletons clattered to the floor. When she stood, the finery around her neck looked like the scruff on some noblewoman's ballgown, and around her waist she'd draped a sash that once marked the lord of the house for high office. She finished the wine and he stared at the mosaic. She made to swing the jug.

"Please don't."

"Why not?"

"It's culture."

"So?"

"It's all that's left of them."

She rubbed her nose. "So it is."

"So it matters."

"No. They're dead."

He tensed, expecting her to throw, but she turned and went out onto the balustraded terrace that looked out over the desert. He placed the skeletons on their backs with arms crossed and went downstairs to wait for her.

 

\--9--

 

Cooper's advances outstripped Watch wages. He spent it on a better bedroll and a new canteen and hid the rest under a floorboard in an empty chapel out of distrust for the small bank Cooper's people seemed to run. He found what had been a library, much depleted, and took what he desired.

He came to dislike the Stoop as his ears acclimated to the wastes—the longer in the desert, the more grating the sound, and the longer in the din, more grating was the silence. He could always find the rover there during nocturnal hours, roosting upon her claimed plot; that dispute had been resolved or had gone to ground. Whenever he saw Marlin and his trio in the yards, they seemed not to notice him.

She spoke little; drank much. Where she'd made her quarters he did not know.

She would not come to him with proposal of foray, and admitted she would await until he was recovered enough after each journey. He began to suspect that she had little need of rest or shelter at all.

"New request," he said. "An old villa in the west."

She finished her drink and set the cup upside down on the table. "Let's away to plunder, then!"

Cooper was at her perch, and did not look away from her note taking as they left.

 

\--10--

 

They called it The Highway That Eats Dead: the path of the war with the insects which brought to bear the full might of the Alliance and Horde against them. They passed the bulk of a Dwarven army's departed weaving league after league, a titanic bronze snake sacrificed and hacked to pieces and smoothed like ocean glass. Six days south they broke west and scrounged what had once been Twilight cult encampments in the shadow of black obsidian outcrops favored—or believed to have been favored—by the bugs. She shrouded herself in the rich maroon robes of the priest-lords, looking at once hermetic and regal, and he told her so and she laughed and showed him how to eat the flowers of caralluma plants for sustenance.

They found the villa under a hot sun and did as they had done, teasing apart the remainder for the overlooked. He did not find the type of document he had been instructed to seek, but came across a vellum of religious appearance that seemed too stately to be worthless.

A previous group had purposely or accidentally caved in the well and so they could not stay overlong. They went out that evening pointing towards the coastal ridges separating their desert from the next.

They went up along a line of stout mountains and spent a week among the scrub pine and acacia and hackberry, under scrutiny of coyotes and herds of spiral-horned sheep that perched like sentinels on the sheer embankments above them. On the second night they saw a fire down in the desert, back the way they came, and she snuffed their fire out and said move hurry on your feet damn you damn you and they did not stop until the next afternoon. That night there were no fires down on the sand. She scaled a peak to observe the way they came and concluded they were not being followed.

"You're being very paranoid," he said.

"I'm only being careful."

"Who would possibly follow us?"

"Cannibals, thieves, deserters."

"You mistake this for a more crowded land."

"Men sent by Cooper to retrieve the papers."

"That's extreme."

"You've seen them."

"I can't read High Kaldorei."

"Pah!" She chucked a stone at a thorny devil eyeing them from a smooth boulder. It twitched out of the way and continued its vigil.

"She wouldn't do that."

Pine pitch popped in the fire. "Don't come shrieking to me when she tries to kill you."

"You're my bodyguard."

"Only on paper," she said, lying down to face the pines.

They came down out of the mountains and began to follow the northwest road back to the Hold. In the evening, three days out, they spied a glow in the distance and began to track south of it until they heard the peal of drums, whereupon she said it was safe to approach.

A spectacle: a caravan drawn up beside the bones of a great white kodo a hundred meters from horn to tail, ribs looming above them. A bonfire had been erected, and dual celebrations were manifest: the primary a clan of tauren breaking fast with the spirit of the kodo for safe travel, and the rest a motley group of travelers happy for an excuse for merriment and company.

An ink-black tauren stood atop the kodo's shoulder blade striking hard at a three-stringed horse-gut guitar and singing throatily in his language, joined by others at strings and drums and a choir of revelers.

They were offered bread and wine and they thanked their hosts and climbed a nearby dune to sit and watch.

"A ritual song?" he asked.

"No. Just a tune to keep them going."

"What are they singing?"

She closed her eyes and unpacked the words inside. "Behind the mask, across the field, running out, running on. Now will I find you? Now will you be here? Hey, hey. This is not a love song, no. This is not a love song. Not a love song."

He dropped the skin of wine he'd been given and stumbled down the dune after it, away from the celebration. From the base he saw her upon the lip of the dune with the setting sun behind her, head nodding to the music, framed entirely in shadowy repose; the high crest of her hair a fan of plumage.

The sand shifted, disturbed by her weight and the trembling of the drums, and a thin band of grains slid down the slope, followed by a second band, and they carried with them a rising sound: a low, long note, a single drum reverberating endlessly. The dune sang in booming notes beneath her and the bonfire smoke rippled the evening redness behind her and the song played on between the bones and to see here there, framed just so, it seemed the song was emanating from her, and solely her, summoning up the night.

 

\--11--

 

They were a week out from the Hold and migrating across the flat bed of some ancient lake like the white surface of a distant moon. Here and there were dotted husks of some bug vanguard ran out and killed upon the dry pan and left to bleach in the sun.

The evening came down fast behind a clouded horizon. They went up into a sea of hillocks below an escarpment beyond which the mountains looked like indigo-stained paper folded against the skyline. Their map indicated a natural cistern somewhere in the ravines, and she suggested they refill there. As night fell they came upon a forest of long-dead trees standing like huge gypsum crystals stretching upward beside a fossilized riverbank.

As they began to winnow their way through the petrified wood, she became agitated with the close confines and muttered something he didn’t hear, crashing out onto the nearest strip of open ground and indicating with a gesture that she’d be off and would return presently, as she often did. He continued upward, hoping the map would sooner or later compel him subconsciously to the correct location of the cistern.

When he’d escaped the gypsum forest, the night was full on and the corona of the galaxy was smeared red-orange-yellow across the sky. He looked down over the desert and could not see the Hold and it was as though he stood upon a disc of land in the void alone. He threaded his way through a switchback strewn with avalanche rocks and later stepped into a many-limbed box canyon. Much concerned with his own thoughts, he did not even notice the light from the fire or the voices until he was almost above them.

"Who's there?" a voice called. Scrabbling below. He’d ducked impulsively behind a boulder. "Who's there? There more 'an one of you? Come out then. We’re outriders from the Hold."

Crawling on his belly, he peered out from the far side of the boulder and saw them turning about where they stood, as though certain there were multiple interlopers surrounding them. They wore drab green Watch uniforms, and hitched nearby to the stumps of old rockwood trees were four horses and two sabercats, all saddled. He counted three at the fire.

"Ho there," he said. "I’m coming down."

"Presently, if you would. Presently."

Holding his hands out, he went down the slope with a small flock of pebbles chasing his steps to stand before the outriders gathered around the fire they’d built of horse turds and sticks. The one speaking had been a man with long black hair and a longer mustache who held a troll-made crossbow, and with him were an orc of young but indeterminate age and one of those rare living-undead, a woman so advanced in decay he’d have thought her a mummy were she not tending the fire with great care and concern. The ground was strewn with old animal bones.

The man squinted at him. "Have we met?"

"I don’t believe so."

"Got a name?"

"Clay."

"What brings you this far out, Clay? You aren’t wearing colors and you h’aint an outrider."

"Treasure-seeker. Sanctioned."

"Ah, ah," the man said, letting his crossbow slacken. He had been pinching the release to keep the bolt in place, which meant the weapon was in need of repairs. "Have a set, then. Get him a bit a that meat."

He was offered a strip of some animal burnt to carbon and began to eat with small bites. They were a sorry-looking lot, dusty and unkempt from too-long tarriance in the wastes.

"I’d heard there was a cistern in these crags," he said.

"Run dry," the boyish orc said, and the man gave him a rude look.

"There might be another spigot somewhere. Say, Clay, there anyone else with you? We can get them fed, too."

"Just me."

"Right, right," he nodded.

"I didn’t get your names."

"Sorry?"

"Your names."

"Steb’s me," he said, "that’s Malak, and that's Old Sara." They nodded mutely at him and stuck about their tasks.

"There more of you?"

"Hm?"

He tilted his head in the direction of the mounts. "Count six."

"Ah, naw, just extras. Good habit. Where’s yours?"

"Threw a shoe down the pan and wouldn’t go on," he said. "Figured I’d hole up here until a party came through."

"Good thinking," Steb said. "Lucky you came across us."

"It’s so."

He sat in silence for a little while and watched the fire. The outriders were quiet. Malak stood and excused himself to make water and the surveyor saw strung around his neck on cord a rotten hand, missing all digits except the thumb. He kept his eyes on the dirt below the fire to recover his night vision by slow turns and only pecked at his meat for show.

"We’ll fetch you up on a horse and get you back to the Hold, fella," Steb said.

"We should go out under darkness to cross the pan. Cooler in the dark."

Steb shook his head. "Miscreants out there, might be we could get lost. Nossir, we’ll sleep the night, and go on then."

"We can navigate by the stars."

Old Sara had ceased her ministrations over the fire and was digging at something under a flap of skin on her jawline but he could tell she was listening. Malak had returned with a light step and the wide eyes of someone prepared to converse.

"Not safe one bit, right, Malak?"

"What is?"

"Crossin the pan in the nocturnals."

"Not one bit."

He tossed the gristle from his meal into the fire, where it sputtered, and crossed his arms. They sat and stared at the firelight that made their faces glow and washed reflective fire across their eyes, three bedraggled scarecrows with burning eyes gathered in a defile under scrutiny of the assembled heavens. He stood and wiped his hands on his pants and Steb look startled.

"I’m up to the peaks on this night to pick the old elven ruins," he said. "I’ll be back down before first light to ride out with you."

"Oh no," Steb said with a doting note, "All manner of spooks up there."

"I can handle any ghosts," he said.

"Just the same. Catch some sleep, you’ll need rest for the cross."

"I’ve no need for sleep. I may even find a working cistern that we may water ourselves before the return." He strode around the fire and was a few steps away when he heard the crossbow being drawn taut. Steb was beaded on him and Malak had produced a knife. Old Sara was still seated but both hands were on her belt.

"Now hold on a minute, hold on. Been outlaws in these wastes. How do we know you’re even who you say you are?"

"And how do I know you are?"

Steb tapped the badge upon his left breast with two fingers. "Says it right here. Protector of the Hold. But you don’t have a bit of heraldry anywhere. Could be you’re sanctioned, could be you h’aint."

"I work for Cooper."

The name made all three of them gasp air like decked fish. "She sent you?" Steb said.

"Sent me?"

"Did she send you?"

"To what?"

Steb sputtered. "It—that woman’s! If you’re some kinda murderer for her, we’ll have to take you in!"

"I thought I recognized you," the boyish orc said with growing concern. "He’s the one with the troll."

"Which troll?"

"The troll!" Old Sara rasped.

"The troll!?" Steb shrieked. "That great unholy bastard?"

As though the mere mention was incantation, a terrible howl echoed from the surrounding cliffs and all four of them wheeled.

"How much is the bounty?" the orc said, pulling a purse from his pocket. "Look, we’ll pay you anything—"

"Damn your hide, she’ll never accept!" Steb cursed. "Call off your troll, Clay! Call her off and we’ll let you walk out of here!"

"You’re in no position to negotiate," he dared.

"I’m holdin' the crossbow and there’s ten of us all told waiting with rifles in the rocks above, and they’ll shoot if I so much as give a word!"

There were more than three but less than ten, he suspected. "I haven’t been sent for whatever it is you’ve done."

"Setup—" Old Sara hissed, but stopped up before she said anything else.

"You let me walk out of here and she’ll never hear about this, you can mark it."

Another howl sounded closer and seemed to reverberate; less an animal and more a bone-carved instrument of some neolithic giant before war.

"Shoot him!" Malak blurted out.

"Wait—"

The bolt flew with a whipping slap and he felt a smack and the wind rushed out of him and he toppled over. He saw them all moving towards him and the mounts straining at their hitchings and suddenly a plume of white dust appeared from a canyon mouth and something huge and dark flew down the slope and landed beside them in a white tidal spray of dust and bone. He saw the gunstock warclub rising up and down and it stove Steb’s skull in two with such alacrity that his head seemed to disappear and it rooted between his clavicles. The mounts went mad and the horses’ hitching broke and they scattered kicking more white plumes of dust-smoke and the gunstock warclub left what had been Steb with a sucking sound and hammered Malak full in the chest and sent him away.

He saw blood on her boiler-pot armor as she knelt over him with an expression of such worry he’d never seen before. "Are you here?" she said insistently.

He peeled back the lamellar frontage of his jacket and showed her where the bolt had pierced his canteen through. When she pulled it back he wheezed and she saw how the arrow-point had punctured half an inch into his right chest.

"Behind you," he said.

Old Sara materialized out of the dry foam with a skinny rapier in hand. Something exploded near his hip and black smoke surrounded them. When it cleared Old Sara was truly dead, with a bloodless wound in her forehead.

The rover looked down at the three-shot pistol in his hand.

"You can shoot?" she said with surprise.

"No."

"You hit her."

"Luck."

She pressed her wide thumb onto his wound to staunch the blood. "First death?"

He winced at the sting. "Yes and no."

The horses had disappeared into the canyons, and all that remained were the two sabercats, still hitched. She made a noise like she was clearing her throat and hefted up her gunstock warclub.

"We can ride them back," he said.

"Too little for me. And they’ll only accept bonded riders, besides."

"They’re just animals."

"Which they'll use to ride us down."

He watched as she dispassionately put down the cats, first one and then the other. The dust had cleared and he saw that Malak had tried to stagger away but had fallen again, and was rolled back upon his bent legs with wide eyes, gasping up at the stars.

"There were two more by the cistern. It’s run dry," she said.

"So they claimed."

"Is your water all gone?"

He shook the canteen. "Did you bring any?"

"No. There will be more of them. Outriders must have chased them here and lost the scent. Maybe a dozen left—some they probably slew upon the wastes surrounding." With the spike elbow of her warclub she made to dispatch Malak but saw that he had already expired.

The surveyor remained sitting. "It’s a week without water. I can’t make it."

"Get up."

"This’ll turn green in a few days. You can move faster alone."

"Stop behaving like a child."

"Go back without me."

"I can’t use the pistol. It’s too small for my hands."

"Neither can I."

"Why didn’t you tell me you had it?"

The fire had burned out and the gorge now appeared to be the site of some indiscriminate slaughter of man and beast. He felt sacrilegious merely existing within it.

"I can’t shoot more than five paces."

"They’ll know we have a gun. It’ll ward them."

"You can slay them."

"Neither on an open plot or in these switchbacks; they have rifles and we don't."

"I can’t make the crossing. Go on."

"You sound hysterical and I will not carry you upon my back." She shouldered her club and went up to wait at the entrance to the switchback he’d come by, and after checking the boyish orc’s coin-purse, which he found to be empty, they fled.

They cut east to circle the dunes surrounding the empty sea and before the sun had even started to rise they saw, several miles behind them, shapes on a bluff. They trudged on through the morning and by noon they could see dust rising from the progress of the riders.

That night the sun went down behind thick haze that turned the edge of the world into a yellow and purple sea that seemed to be seeping down towards them. They could not stop on open ground, and so they struggled on beneath a starless sky, he on the left and she on the right to keep from accidentally pacing circles.

By midnight the dunes had flattened out and they came upon four bluffs of silithid manufacture, now standing like abandoned lighthouses overlooking an ill-remembered harbor. A minor hive had been excavated between the two largest points, and the long organic fronds that had once demarcated the edges looked like the fingerbones of some titanic creature buried alive.

He was depleted, and she had no water to give him. They crossed the rippling, dried-out chutes of the hive to where the desert rejoined it and knew the Hold lay somewhere to the north. Two miles behind them, the plume of the riders was visible.

"Two shots?"

"Two."

She peered around and indicated a rise. The approach on the south side was steep and perilous, but it offered easy access to the north. They went up the rise and dropped, sweating and cold, in the shade of an egg-like overhang. His wound was starting to itch.

"Don’t."

"Give me some of that garland to bind it with."

She fingered the bright pink tassel of elven silk stuffed behind her gorget, frowning slightly. She tore it out and gave it to him and looked down at the riders.

There were eight in all, split among five horses and a sabercat. Two remained behind while six ranged out over the hive in pairs.

He checked and re-checked the gun, hoping it was still operational.

She flattened down her greasy pluck of hair so that the garrulous colors would not give them away. "Only use one."

"What if they all come?"

"I’ll worry about them. Only use one."

Through a bore in the bottom of the eggshell he saw two who were armed with crossbows and three with flintlocks, and a tauren who was bedecked in talismans of human hands and had for armaments only a strange fetish of desert thornbush wrapped painfully around his left arm.

"Shaman."

"Or a ruse," she said.

When they reached the base of the rise, the thorn-arm and one of the gunners started scaling the embankment while the others checked the silithid burrows.

She was folded in the crook of the egg like some great and cancerous crab prepared for rude birth.

The shaman was the first to step into the egg and he saw in the tauren’s eyes a kind of devotional surety of action. He pulled the trigger and missed entirely.

A sound issued from the shaman like a crying bird and the thorns upon his arm thrashed and expanded and raked blood from his veins and she unfolded. The gunstock warclub whipped a clockhand course around the interior of the egg passing bare inches from his face, and collapsed the tauren’s chest with a shucking noise like an oystershell being broken. He was launched back the way he'd come and fell out of sight, trailing a cloud of dried leaves.

There was shouting and two flintlocks discharged and the bullets passed through the egg, missing both of them. They pressed themselves against the far side and waited. When no one presented themselves, he crawled on his belly to the bore and looked down and saw them retreating south with the body of the shaman borne between them.

He checked the lone bullet in the three-shot. "Some saying about going to war against holy men."

"Mhm."

That night the riders built a fire to burn the shaman in the basin below and she peeled open the back of the egg and they slipped out into the night.

They trotted out across the expanse of a battle from the most recent war. Horde and Alliance soldiers lay in fanblade formations of counterattacks and feints and buckled flanks, and the heaps of silithid husks between them told the stories of what had happened there. War-engines and catapults broiled in the fires of their own making and left to tarnish in the sun, looking like industrial pig-iron mysteriously dumped in this forgotten quarter. By dawn they’d left the battlefield and could see the dust of the riders in pursuit again. His wound was pussing and pulled with every step.

They pulled up after sunset beneath a bare overhang and saw a fire lit in the distance.

"They’re trying to fool us."

"They’re not," she said. "They think we’ll die of thirst before tomorrow is out."

"We have to keep going—" he said, as his legs wobbled. She steadied him but he slumped into the dirt and fell into a dreamless sleep.

She roused him with dawn still hours off and checked his wound. It was yellow and fever was setting in.

"Go on without me."

"You’re a poor soldier."

"I’m no soldier."

"I can tell."

The riders had lit a second fire to the east, perhaps to confound them, or perhaps due to strife among them.

The next day they spent dragging painfully across the sand, and the riders did not close more than five miles at best. They slept two hours beneath the cluttered shell of an overturned elven watchtower.

He learned years later that he'd awoken delirious during the short night beneath the watchtower and searched fruitlessly, frantically, sobbing in the sand for something he could not put words to.

On the next day the sun was so bulbous and so close at hand it seemed to be a false sun hanging on the dome of an amphitheater that moved above unwitting actors. The world around them baked obscenely.

By afternoon he collapsed and could not go on and was without speech. He remembered her shadow over him and the sweat hanging from the edge of her nose, and he remembered grasping her tusk for need of something sensate. He felt himself borne up and an even, constant jostling and a light breeze that went on into unconsciousness, and somewhere the sound of shouting and horns and gunfire, and then nothing.

 

\--12--

 

Five days later he awoke in the infirmary, bundled in white linens sealed to him with sweat. The wooden walls were blackened from where a fire had one scorched the whole room. The doctor was a thin Amani troll of grass-green complexion who checked his temperature. "Stable," she said.

"Sobek."

"Fine. Hauled you half a day’s run across open land before the only squadron out on patrol happened to spot her."

"Deserters."

"Scattered and or dead, as far as I know." She examined his chest. "The infection was corollary. You suffered extreme dehydration. Thankfully, we could barely get you to stop drinking. Some people have a strong instinct."

He was up and about by evening, though still weak on his feet. He asked after Sobek and was told she’d come to see him a few days earlier but had not spoken to anyone. The doctor advised him to find a quiet room and continue sleeping off the sickness, and gave him a concoction called "redwater," a jug of which he which he was instructed to mix with tea if necessary to get down and finish in no more than three days, and to return for another batch to make sure his fever ran its course.

His quarters had been an empty tannery that smelled faintly of tallow, but a pair of drugged-out orcs had moved in to occupy the far side to ride out whatever narcotic was bedeviling them, and when they started speaking gibberish he shuffled off to find another room.

He dozed for days, rising only to drink the redwater until he was roused by a gentle tapping on his cheek. A small disheveled girl was standing over him.

"Leave me alone."

"You have a meeting with Cooper," the girl said plainly.

"Ah."

 

\--13--

 

"Fen. So good of you to drop by."

"'Drop by' makes it sound like I just happened to be in the neighborhood."

"You are always in my neighborhood when you are in the Hold." Cooper was drawing tables on a large chalkboard that dominated the left wall amidst the cramped cabinets of the tiny office. "I'll be with you in a moment."

The ticking of the chalk mingled with the ticking of the clocks to produce an atonal hum that had him sweating by minute three. She carried on as though he was not present.

"Can we not do this?"

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. "Do what?"

"The part where I sit here, stewing in it. I still have a fever."

"I apologize. I've got a million little projects to take care of today, so you'll forgive me for getting distracted." She tossed away the stub of chalk and grabbed another.

"It's fine."

"What?"

"Wound's fine."

"We only hire the best. I spoke with the Commander, and you'll be happy to know the cost of your treatment has been deferred for your services in the line of duty."

"Oh, good."

She smacked her hands clean of dust and a white pall settled over her body like some crematorium lurker. She settled down at her desk and began to go through a stack of papers, jotting notation at the bottom and in the margins of each. "Your bodyguard said you spoke to the deserters before you enacted escape."

"I happened upon them in a canyon."

"You spoke to them at length?"

"Barely at all."

"Did they offer much?" She stopped reading. "What precisely did they say?"

"That they were outriders. Told them I was a scrounger. Threatened to take me in when Sobek attacked. After that, we ran."

"Nothing else?"

"Bantered about the weather, but that's all."

"I simply—" she clasped her hands together, "Was there anything they might have offered in passing about why they deserted, or... specifics surrounding their criminal actions? Their compatriots had some valuables on their person and the Commander is concerned for the safety of travelers upon the roads."

He resisted the strong and sudden urge to rub his eyes. "Nothing like that, sorry."

"Quite fine. To other business—your troll."

"She's not my troll."

"She is unresponsive to my calls to meet with her and so I am bringing the matter up with you. She is your responsibility."

He crossed his arms. "She's a grown woman."

Cooper rubbed the bridge of her nose. "She has been an ongoing problem for the Watch. She unsettles the citizenry. She sells priceless artifacts—" this she almost sputtered, "to peddlers for a pittance. She breaks everything she touches and she incites fights nearly every night in the Stoop, where she has run up a tab far in excess of her wages."

"I haven't seen her get in a single fight."

"She doesn't. She starts them. As if she had everyone drugged. Just a word here and there."

"Well, I don't know what you want me to do about it."

"You're the one person she listens to."

"So just kick her out."

"I did. She keeps coming back because she knows I cannot stop her. I don't have a bouncer big enough." She sneezed. "Terribly clever one. Many of the soldiers like her, too. Find her entertaining. Waiting to see who else she'll strike down."

"What does it matter?" he said, voice rising with frustration, "What does some wreck of a crumbling bar and this heap of rubble matter? What good is it?"

She propped up her chin on a closed fist. "You're right. It isn't good. Not yet."

"What good are all the deeds? What good is all of it? What do you want? The whole damn desert?"

Not a tendon twitched in Cooper's face. "You should go get some rest, and tend to your associate, Mr. Fen." He heard the door open behind him. "You have a good afternoon."

 

\--14--

 

He inquired after the rover and was met with silence or dismissal.

He spent the day and the day after wandering the lower Hold, getting the strength back in his legs and checking the Stoop for any sign of her. The quartet whose table she’d commandeered had, in her absence, returned to their perch. Finches finally rid of their terrible outsized cuckoo parasite. None, not even the grim man called Marlin, so much as glanced at him.

He asked some of the barmaids and nightworkers, but they had not seen sign of her and seemed the more at ease by it.

On the second evening he sat at the farthest end of the bar, working slowly through a pint of the redwater and some hard-shelled nuts when Cooper came in by a side door and sat a few paces down. She’d brought a small ledger filled with tiny, illegible print and and proceeded to write without stopping except to bring a small glass of whiskey to her lips. After fifteen minutes without acknowledgment or glance he grew so disquieted that he paid his tab and left. She did not look up or pause in her work as he departed.

He returned to the doctor for another allotment of the redwater and learned that rumor had it the rover was up among the high reaches of the Hold, and had ransacked something or pillaged someone; anyway she was known to be about but had not been seen in many days.

A rare thunderstorm came on the night and it let go with a torrential rain that would be swallowed up by the sand before sunrise. He watched soldiers hauling out troughs and buckets to catch rainwater in the yards, and it had begun to fall in earnest as he returned inside. As he dug deeper into the vast interior the sheeting rain became a distant droning and finally a kind of humming that overlaid the marrow of the place and ran up into his ankles.

He wove his way through old bunkhouses and armories and messes and happened upon a family of kobolds dwelling in a massive room filled halfway and to the ceiling with piles of pottery and dishware, dumped like feed in a granary. They pecked over the toothgrey mounds, grey themselves, with a sort of slow, deliberate reverence like choral pigeons, and he wondered how they had come to be here and to what end, but he only inquired after "the troll," and with gestures they indicated which way to go.

Passing places so long uninhabited that only the old ever-burning elven lanterns lit the way at intersections, and some not at all, and at times he had to grope along the walls to keep his footing. He began to see signs of her; rooms all torn apart for trinkets and desirables, the dust disturbed.

He turned a corner and nearly ran full into an obstruction that he first took to be collapsed ceiling; retrieving a lamp from the previous intersection, he discovered it to be a man-made barricade of ruined furnishings and stovepiping.

He scaled it carefully and dropped down on the other side, where it seemed even blacker than before. He heard the quiet rattle of rain nearby. At the end of the little hall was a steel door barely ajar, with scant nocturnal light clinging the edges like frost-rime.

The door was painfully cold to the touch, as though the room beyond it had been leached of all heat. As he stepped through he was struck by a pungent odor and a humidity in the air. The room was black and on the black was the stamp of an old window-door leading to an unfenced patio which observed the desert like the overlook of some fickle deity.

"Sobek," he said. "Sobek—"

He heard a rushing and a disturbance of air but in the blackness could not discern a direction or source and so could only raise his hands as something pushed him onto a pile of books fallen from a high shelf.

"Hell. I'm sorry," the rover said.

She was naked, and glowered down at him in her nakedness with impersonal abashment. Against the blackness and the window she was a damp hematoma thumbed and folded into giant anatomical proportions, slick with sweat and dirt runners of booze. Her whole body steamed in the dark and smelled of boiling onions and crud dug under nails.

He maintained, more through shock than anything else, some semblance of composure. "Just me."

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"I was worried."

"I'm getting better."

"Good." Two strides took her to the closest divan which she threw herself down upon, legs akimbo and revealing a protruding mane running up her stomach and down her legs that in the darkness hid the particulars but impressed upon him the probable rubric instead. She rubbed flakes from her eyes. "Is it this?" she said, pointing impolitely at her middle. "You want it? I can tell."

Still prone upon the books he sat up. "Good grief."

"Those swineherds downstairs—they want it. What they don’t understand—what they fear and hate—a novelty, just a once. A joke! They say, ‘Who can bed the beast, who’s ‘man’ enough?’ And they point down," she gestured again at her middle, "but they know I'd break a bench over them and so they say it behind my back. ‘Who can see what’s under the armor.’ Well?" she demanded, grabbing her right breast, "You’ve seen it! Are you not awed? Are you 'man enough?'"

"You shouldn’t be up here alone and drinking."

She slumped back in the divan, stood, and crossed in front of the window, her shadow running double-sized in the flashes of the cracking thunder. She produced a jug of some foul brew and returned to the divan, throwing herself on it longwise and drinking deeply from the jug. He had pulled himself into a red velvet armchair by the books, and regarded her with worry.

"How long, since…" she began, "How long since long since we died for a Tree? I no longer care."

"Tree?"

"Hyjal," she croaked in her throat, as though the word hurt like a dry bronchial cough. "Hyjal. Where the line of Neith ran out." She tipped her head back and her spiked crest fell over the armrest.

"My uncle fought it," he said. "Died of consumption two years later. Never spoke of it."

She spoke slowly. "The demon king and his army all across the valley. A mightier army has never been seen. They broke in half the mortals gathered there to stop them, all the heroes of the Horde and Alliance, and we looked out from our hidden places and were afraid. Most cautioned against aid. My father among them. It was not our war. But the chieftains settled it. It would be as it once was, when we helped the star children fight the burning ones."

She covered her eyes.

"And so we went forth in all regalia and we joined battle and we fought them back and crushed them, and we saved that Tree and were victorious. But they knew—they pulled their forces back in the thickest of it, and so we bore the fullness of the demon lines, and we were slaughtered down to a handful before the day was done.

"When we went to entreat with the victors, they chased us from the field and killed those they could and we few returned to our hollows. None of my own family returned. And so for our service we were betrayed, and the remaining chieftain decreed we would seal the hollows and go down, far down, to where they would never find us, to wait out the Dissolution of the World and the Next Creation, and any who wanted it so could depart and make their way across the ending world we’d died to save, if they so chose such exile."

For a long time they were quiet and he thought perhaps she’d gone to sleep. The storm outside had abated to a keener rain and he rose and cracked the balcony door whereupon she stirred a little and took a swig of her jug.

"I didn’t know," he said.

"Few do."

"Why did you?"

"Why what?"

"Choose exile?"

She chewed a scab on the back of her hand and he went back to the armchair. "We saved this ungrateful land and her ungrateful people."

"Are there others?"

"Dead, on some pointless battlefield somewhere. Or in some show of the bizarre. Good riddance."

A breeze began to push the rainfall through the open door and left a spray upon the cool stone, though neither of them went to shut it.

"See this?" she said, pushing a spot behind her long ear. "This scar."

"I’ve seen it."

"Shrapnel. Cannonfire. Beneath the Tree. It stole my taste away." She covered her forehead. "Sweets. I used to love sweets. The rock candies they sold from caravans in the north. They were the first to go. They tasted bitter, and then, nothing. Pick pick pick," she wiggled her finger, "until nothing. Then it was vegetables. Then meat and bread. Tastes of meal." She grew angry, voice nearly shouting. "And all the liquid—metal! Metal, metal, metal! Swallowing mashed iron to stay alive! Even water is like copper now. Copper like blood from split cheeks. I can’t stand the liquor. Can’t stand any of it even when it makes me numb."

"We could find you a doctor."

"It wouldn’t work."

"You don’t know that." He bunched himself up in the chair, rubbing his eyes, still tiring of the fever's end. "I'm worried."

"About me?"

"Cooper's arrangement with us."

"With you."

"She called me to her office. Kept asking about the deserters. What they said to me. I think we're on eggshells."

She propped her head up on her arm. "I won't let anything happen to you."

He pressed his cheek against the side of the chair and did not remember falling asleep but when he had awoken she was gone. Someone had taken off his shoes and placed a pillow beneath his head. The morning light and breeze spilled through the open patio.

 

\--15--

 

The pacification of the deserters seemed to quiet the Hold, and for weeks the Stoop seemed without merriment whenever he frequented it. Cooper he had not seen since their meeting. The rover said nothing of the storm-wracked night and so they continued their work in the western gulfs and slowly, after weeks, began to work their way into the interior towards the city of the insects, once and forever known as Ahn’Qiraj.

Two days north of that place they came upon a basin and camped there. They sat and ate shriveled fruit and flicked the seeds away and watched small brown wrens scrabble over them, whipping up dust devils. A pair of javelinas came and watched them silently. He was about to throw a piece when she the back of her hand upon his.

"No."

"Seems a charity."

"They might follow us."

"What of it?"

"Someone might follow them to follow us."

"You’re paranoid."

She leaned back into the shade of the many-limbed cactus, diaphanous underneath the morning sun, and with one finger spun a bangle upon her tusk that whistled like a whetstone.

The plain before the city was strewn all over with gravel and strewn again with the leavings of the last war; heaps of bugs like the inner bones of ears and the armor-shucked skeletons of the attacker cast far and wide upon the strand.

They were all day crossing and in the purpling evening the heat haze still had not abated and the city came up over the horizon like a low black wave. Before it they spied the remains of colossi huge and black with jackal heads before the hexagonal gate which had been smashed apart in months of siege. The Scarab Wall. City of the silithid.

They saw figures moving across one of the goliaths and he ducked behind a rock.

"They're kin enough to me," she said. "Come on."

They were a family of sand trolls, their skin like parchment, refugees from the simmering war in the far east. The patriarch and two other men approached with staves in hand and stopped twenty paces away.

"Where going?"

"Into the city," she said.

He shook his head. "No, no. Dalak burr."

The surveyor glanced at her, but she was already giving him a look that chastised him for assuming they spoke a kindred language.

"What of it?" she demanded.

The old man looked between the surveyor and the city and her. "No sleep. No sleeping."

"They’re gone," she said.

"No, no."

"Very well, then," she said, striding past him. "Let’s go."

When they passed the cratered skull of the colossi, the surveyor looked up to see the women and children all standing there, mournful rooks huddled together as they departed.

They crept under the eaves of the city, beneath etched ramparts and carved obsidian. Huge bas reliefs of eons-old idolatry. The wind moved in strange ways through the crenellations of the ruins, rising and falling and chirping in the distance.

They found one of the fabled "obelisks," twenty feet of welt black stone, hovering, as the soldiers had spoken of. He passed his hand below it, expecting to feel the power of whatever held it aloft. Nothing. He pushed it. Nothing. Whatever it was had gone mute and deaf and petrified.

She rapped it with her knuckle. "Dead magic," she said.

They crossed a bridge-way and he could see down into abandoned chasms packed with armor and exoskeletons.

They came upon a huge domed temple, doors smashed open, explosive craters marring the ramp, an octagonal entrance leading downward.

"Let's go in."

"Go on, then. I want to see what's left of their stone guardians," she said, pointing towards a district of bone-dry canals. "Their gems will fetch a fine price."

"There might be looters."

"None but us."

"There might be bugs down below. They killed some giant monster down there, at the end of the war. I need protection."

"There's nothing left alive," she said, clearing her throat. "And I don't have to follow you around like some trained dog."

"It's in your contract."

"A forged contract."

"Is this about what happened?"

"What happened?" she said, eyes widening, secretary bird-bent in her back.

"Nothing, I mean—"

"Yes," she said, sternly, stepping away with a long, exaggerated step, "Nothing."

"I didn't mean anything bad of it," he said, but she did not respond, only went away down the long stairway promenade, her armor cracking and echoing off the scarab-etched ramparts.

 

\--16--

 

He crept down into the bones of the city through high-vaulted channels of basalt and obsidian. He tried to imagine them as they once were, teeming with empire, a million bodies preparing for the coming enemy. How they must have seen it: that menagerie arranged on their doorstep, decked for war and for the spectacle of war, and they must have appeared as some manner of hellspawn to these people. The subject of some triptych turned a mirror. How, to them, they were a truly existential threat. How acutely they must have known the enemy had come not to subjugate, but to erase, as done before, and would be done again.

It must have been a time of great anxiety, knowing had they been successful what future calamities they may have prevented.

He burrowed deeper and gradually his lantern became of less use for the prevalence of the glowing flies that lit the place. He had his kit and was not overly worried; she had begun to wean him of his dependence of nourishment, showing him how to survive on little more than a few cups of water each day. He remembered what she’d said about taste; how she rarely drank and hardly ate, and when she did it was like a snake: gorging, binging without enjoyment and retreating someplace to process her stores.

Except for the glowflies, he saw no trace of life. Empty storehouses cathedral-vast. The walls in places had once moved with thick organic material, but all that remained were petrified shoots. The death of the place had revealed its geometric perfectionism in smooth planes and right angles, and the cleanness of it all unsettled him.

The hatcheries were torched. Hundreds of millions of eggs in mile long rows burnt to pitch and hardened. Shapes among them, twisted up, reminding him of how in the spring his brothers and father would go out into the fields to burn the litter, and how the little red bats sleeping beneath in wintertime, not yet awake, would fly up ablaze, spinning, crackling, and fall to ground like blackened balls of paper.

They’d burned another nation like this at the Blackrock, too, he’d been told, scant years before this campaign, and carried the method out here again. The differences in form assuaged concerns. He could picture their shapes moving through the rows like ushers among congregation, the air black with smoke and their bodies black like gore-soaked men aboard a whaling ship after catch. The separation of the act allowed them to carry out their orders without fear.

He remembered seeing in the paper a story about a man who "went mad." He killed his family, and, taking his knife and hatchet, ran out into the marketplace down the street and began to slash at everyone in reach and was put down by watchmen only after a gruesome toll of injuries had been inflicted on the witnesses.

It was noted that the man had been away at war, "abroad."

He wondered if the man had stood in that chamber, smelling the smoke and the life being reduced to carbon, promised that he was in the right, carrying that promise and the smell back with him locked inside until one bright morning it collapsed out of him and dragged the better part of him with it.

He’d been marking his way with chalk arrows until the chalk ran out and he elected to turn back. The whole place seemed to blend together in its geometric tidiness.

He missed an arrow, or perhaps it had been rubbed out or he’d just turned astray; his heart raced and he doubled-back. Doubled-back again. Forgot if he’d turned here, there. Jogging. Running. The hugeness of the city becoming real to him. A hundred Holds stacked together. He would die of thirst, alone. The alien reliefs took on leering forms that chased him deeper inside, sprinting down long, dusty boulevards, the glowflies diminishing, the sweat chilling his garments. He’d seen no organic remains save for those in the hatcheries.

His flight took him blindly into a vast, darkened space. He wound down from a dead sprint and from the fear that had overtaken him. Slowly, his eyes adjusted.

It had been a palace, or a coliseum, maybe, but that was the bias of civilization; for the civilized, a room must have a purpose. Even a sitting room, where very little of import happens, must exist so the drudgery of other rooms takes on profundity. Cluttered rooms are safe: corners filled and tables piled offering the secure promise of eternal behindedness. The sanctity of hours filled with tasks. An empty room is pregnant with terrible possibilities.

The featureless floor stretched out in all directions, terminating equidistant all around him beneath a muddy, sourceless light above that seemed to follow in unison his motions. He felt as though he was standing suspended over a still, dark lake, and was taken back to the green fog and the brute cliff. This place felt the same; as though it had been waiting, or had been brought with him.

He was, again, unstuck from everywhere and everything else, and so he splayed across the floor and stared up into the dim light, listening to his breathing. The desert had been a new, cleansing silence, but this was a silence altogether deeper.

After minutes or hours heard clicking: a six-note report, slowly, distant, and then closer. He sat up.

She seemed to materialize, as though out of water that did not ripple from her passing, pale fabric streaming behind her. A tattered robe of pale purple and yellow--once brilliant gold--that only intensified her Otherness as she approached on six heavy legs. Dark eyes without pupil or iris—painter’s blue.

When she spoke, it wasn't ordinary speaking—it was made out of clicks and hitches, mouthparts bouncing over simple animal noises. A mimicking trick. A person-ventriloquist.

"Lost," she said.

"I am."

"Have you taken anything?"

"Anything of what?"

"Anything at all from here."

"No."

She made a whistling noise which he took to be laughter. "No. Nothing here is of any value now."

"I'm sorry."

"Are you alone?"

"There's another up above. She might attack your people if she sees them."

"My people? There are no people left."

His throat was dry. "I didn't fight the war. No one in my family did."

"Your nations fought it," she said. "And this benefited you, though you were a child."

"Silithid."

"Your word for us. Qiraji is a more appropriate, though still-poor translation."

"You."

"Yes."

"Queen?"

Her feelers twitched. "A simple nomenclature you'd append to me; but yes, it will do. For the purposes it would serve to term my role, as once, 'queen."

"This shouldn't have happened."

"Ill comfort."

"I’m sorry."

"No, you aren’t."

"It’s what we say in situations like this."

"To what?"

"What?"

"Why say such things?"

"To remain calm."

She did a strange little jig and knelt or sat upon the cold floor, closing her eyes meditatively.

"Are you frightened?"

"I don’t think so."

"Your life is currently at risk."

"That’s comforting."

"Is it?"

He thought about it. "Knowing I have no control. Knowing something is beyond my control."

There was a rumble from above and a fine grey particulate began to settle from the skylight, dusting them like the ash of some great detonation. "Soon, all this will collapse," she sighed.

"Leave," he said.

"And go where? Among whom?"

"I'm sorry."

"Cease that. Why did you come here?"

"This room, or this city?"

"Both."

"I think I can't stop running without ending up exactly where I've been before."

She wiped her eyes on the hem of her robe, oddly humane and geriatric-tired. "Who are they fighting now?"

"Warring with one another on a new continent in the south. Finishing war with the Death-wing."

"The dragons?"

"So they say."

He slumped so that his forearms were level with the floor, tracing circles in the dust, drawing points with his fingers. She watched intently.

"I sent an envoy before the war began. To beg armistice. We brought gifts of gold and silver. Devices of the Stone-Ancients that your people hold in such high regard. And scrolls with our techniques of medicine and healing. Thousands of years of application and refinement. So beyond leeches and bloodletting." Her legs clattered against the floor as she stood. "Our envoy was returned impaled and beheaded. And—" she paused, choking even in mimicry, "—every scroll was burned." She shook her head. "So much good, lost."

He jumped to his feet. "If there are any left I can bring them somewhere—the Stormwind College of Sciences—"

"—there is nothing here for me to give you, nor would I, if I could."

"She's trying to take it," he stammered, "The whole thing. Cooper."

"Who?"

"At the Hold. She's trying to take the whole desert."

"She may have it, for all the good it will do. It will reject her, in time."

"You remind me of someone I know. She's the last, too."

"Last of what?"

"The last of them."

There was a mighty roar so discordant and sudden he fell over as though smashed with a gong. A huge shadow passed beside him and for a moment he believed some creature of the underground had come for vengeance, and then he saw the gunstock warclub swinging. "Back, back, animal!" she shouted. The queen skittered out of reach as the rover crouched over him defensively.

"A child of Neith—I thought the line extinguished."

"One still burns enough to take you with it. Step forward, and let me have your head!"

"Leave, before you are trapped here, too, children." The queen folded into the darkness behind her, and was gone.

"A servant of the old slavers," the rover said with disgust.

"She's the only one left. Like you."

She glared and shoved the cross-bar within inches of his face. "That is nothing like me." She dropped to her knees, spiked guards scraping loud upon the floor. "She is nothing like me." Her armor was bursting with scepters, ceremonial crooks and flails, and they now spilled out as he dropped his hands across her wide shoulders and pressed his face against the fuzz of her scalp and she held him for nothing in her arms.

"Let's go."

 

\--17--

 

He woke up in a bivouac they’d erected beneath a sloughed-off watchtower to ride out the night’s sandstorm. They’d tossed and turned in the night and he awoke with her hand inches from his face, paw upturned huge and bearlike with hard cracked nails. White sand ground under them.

He was still half asleep, face pressed against his bedroll, vision a hair above the ground; her hand loomed above him a pre-dawn monolith. The brief coolness and the blue made them seem like fish sheltering in a grotto after a hurricane.

He touched the tip of her smallest finger, traced the fingernail. She stirred, the big bellows of her lungs sighing out. Pressed his thumb into the bark hardness of her knuckles, feeling smooth craters of old, picked-at scars. Bleary eyes open, barely open, staring up, tusks upraised. Following the outline of her thumb, resting in the scooped-smooth spot where something had torn away a chunk of meat a long time ago; his fingers fell into her palm.

The wind made a tattle-tale sound. Her fingers squeezed down over his and the middle nail pressed a hard red line. Another bellow sigh and her grip slackened and her palm slid down until their fingers rested together and they waited there like that as the dunes sang somewhere in the distance, tracing each other’s fingers.

They were startled by the pattering cry of a cactus wren and she pulled her hand away and heaved in half-sleep, kicking up ground. He covered his face in his bedroll. When he looked up she was already hauling herself through the sand-packed opening.

He got out of the bivouac and saw that a great storm had settled over the east, beyond the desert, and it seemed as though a purple cap had enveloped the whole country there. The sun overhead shown resplendent. She was stepping in circles, scanning the horizons with hard eyes as though practicing the moves of a scarcely recalled jig. He took his compass out of his pocket and put it back again.

"What about that."

"About what?"

"That."

"I don't know."

"You do."

"Leave it alone."

A caracal came silently over a rise in the south and stood looking down at them. She whistled and it disappeared.

"No."

She paused. "That’s difficult."

"Of me?"

"Yes."

"I love you."

She rubbed her scalp with both hands and looked at her feet. "Don't use it so cheaply like that."

"You saved me twice now."

"You only owe me one more, then."

"When did I first save you?"

She gently lifted the pack from his shoulder and strung it over a burr of her armor. She took his hand and they walked out into the flat tableland before them.

 

\--18--

 

He awoke on the divan to the smell of smoke.

He'd spent the days following the descent into the city drained, and had not even gone to see Cooper upon his return.

He threw open the patio doors and saw sheets of smog wrapping around the southern side of the Hold, but had no view of the yards or Watch-Keep. It was close to midnight. He heard distant shouting. He dressed and ran out the door, and ran back and grabbed his pack, and ran back again to get the three-shot pistol from under the bucket in the corner.

Squatters and Hold-dwellers were moving in a downward direction. Not all spoke the common tongue and of those none would stop to answer his questions beside cries of "Fire! Fire!" He ducked into a murky stairwell and slapped himself against the wall as a massive bureau slid from the landing above. A bickering trio of dwarves followed with bewildered yelling and tried to enlist him in extracting it, but he hurried down the stairs and deeper into the smoke.

The two addict orcs he'd abandoned in the tannery were trying to carry a wounded man down the stairs, behind a mattress-raft stacked with belongings which a goblin family were desperately trying to hold together. He ducked through an archway, weaving through a kitchen with pots still boiling on the stoves. Somewhere without or within there was a crack and a shuddering that almost threw him off his feet.

He lurched down a long hallway, coming to a T-intersection he recognized. The Stoop was closeby.

"I found him! I found him!" He recognized the braid of orange-yellow hair on the gnoll from the quartet barreling down the hall with a short sword and buckler raised above his head.

"I'll shoot!" he snarled, drawing the three-shot. The gnoll stopped. He turned and ran.

The Stoop was a kiln; flames ran up the walls and licked the floors. They covered the bar-top and the tables and the silithid trophy heads were curling, crackling, their jaws splitting open as though come alive again in agony.

The man called Marlin had a C-shaped scar beneath his eye where the rover had struck him, what seemed a lifetime before. He drew up beside the gnoll, carrying a longsword.

"No big beast here to save you, lad."

"I'll shoot you both."

"He doesn't know how to shoot," the gnoll said.

"Your choice. Put it down and I'll make it fast. Shoot, and I'll see you bound and left to burn."

He was backed into a corner and they spread to cover his escape. The leather seats behind him boiled and spat hot grains against his neck.

"All she did was slap you!"

"It's not about that now," Marlin said, giving his sword a dull swing.

"Shouldn't have trucked with monsters, boyo," the gnoll said.

His thumb slid sweat-glistening down the hammer. Once, twice. The longsword glowed in the firelight as Marlin and the gnoll approached.

"Stand down, gentlemen."

And there was Cooper, donned in huge steelsmith's gloves and apron, foundry goggles perched in her onion-bob of hair. She removed her gloves and tucked them under her armpit before retrieving a notepad from her apron pocket. She plucked a stout pencil from behind her ear, scribbled something down, put away the notepad and tromped over to the surveyor's side.

"Minor change of plans."

"What are you on about?" Marlin snarled. 'What the hell is this?"

"Excuse me," she said, as she pulled the pistol from the surveyor's limp hands. She plugged Marlin and the gnoll each once in the chest without pause, and the third shot she sent into the rafters and threw the pistol on the table behind her.

"So good to find you unmolested, Mr. Fen." She put on her gloves, pulled the goggles down over her eyes, protruding huge and insectoid. "You'll want to extract yourself post haste, since the whole place is about to come down."

"Good grief."

"You are welcome."

"What the hell's happening? Are we under assault?"

"The assault of opportunity, Mr. Fen," she said, strolling away. "Please, see yourself out."

 

\--19--

 

The yards were a madhouse. The Watch tried to maintain order, but order had been largely abandoned. The causeways clogged with fleeing bodies. Horses screamed in the stables and two sabercats mad with fear had gored a man and were being put down amidst the chaos. Smoke poured from the Hold, yet the Watch-Keep was a more terrible vision: flames whipped out of the open windows at all levels. Bucket lines had formed, but panic reigned and all seemed ready to quit that place.

"Fen," he heard a hoarse voice say.

For a moment he did not recognize her; she wore a hand-me-down set of moth-bitten leather armor. Her cross-bar was gone. She was caked with dirt and ash and her chest worked like a bellows. She hugged him. "You're alive."

"Yes."

"Run."

She shouldered through the swarm on the northwest causeway until, more than twenty feet up, she gathered him under her arm and leapt over the side. His teeth clicked as she struck the dry moat and dashed out under the cover of darkness more than a quarter-mile or more to stop at  
the crest of a dune by the half-collapsed frame of an old tent.

"You can let me down now."

"Sorry."

He twisted this way and that to work the knots out of his ribs and they watched the fire from afar.

Many had grabbed their belongings--or what belongings remained--and were fleeing along the north roads with all haste without thought to ration and drink; many would likely return the next day, no matter what remained, for fear of crossing the wasteland so rashly. As the flames climbed higher, the roof of the Keep began to sag and glow.

She'd gone under the tent and was lying down on a sheet she'd found and smoothing it with her hand. He sat down on the edge of it.

"Are you hurt?" she asked.

"No. You?"

"Fine."

"You weren't there when I woke up."

"I was coming back to get you."

He rubbed sand between his fingers. "I'll miss this."

"Will you?"

"Not really, no."

He crawled into the tent and laid down on his belly beside her and stared into the flames.

"This reminds me of a dream," she said.

"Go ahead."

"There's a battle in the dream. Miles long, beneath tall trees and in wide valleys. There's someone with me: only I can't see their features. We find this den: like a rabbit-hole, and somehow, we sneak down into it, and roots and dirt close off our passage. We dig down and bury ourselves there, and clutch each other, and our contours interlock and grow still, and the sounds of fighting are so far away. And we hide there, warm, and secure, until the battle is done. Until long after. Not saying anything. Not awake or asleep. We don't grow old. We stir to hear each other breathe. But nothing else. And we are safe. Finally, just, safe."

"I accept you."

"I don't need your acceptance," she said, rumbling thermal, "I just need to know..." her voice dropped low, way down, to a decibel he'd never heard her speak before, to a place sure and placid, that made him think of a grey-green jungle beneath a brute black cliff, "I need to know that you'll be afraid with me. I need to know that you'll hide away with me, away from all this thunder."

He looked out into the darkness and listened to the Hold, and as his night-vision returned he saw to the south atop a high lonely dune an outline resisting the stars behind it. Something alien and regal, streamers flowing behind, watching the Hold burn. He saw--or thought he saw--the shape turn towards him, and reflected in the fire two blue discs filled with the desert sky. Some part of the Keep then collapsed with a crash and he looked away and when he looked back he could see only the unbroken monochrome of night sky.

"I'll try."

"Me too," she said, as they stowed themselves beneath the tent and waited for dawn.

 

\--20--

 

In the morning they joined the processions retreading the long and littered causeway. Someone suggested that the way may be barred for the danger of fires still-burning, but a guard going the other way on horseback was telling people that everything had been extinguished down to embers.

The yards were a curious mix of exhausted Hold-dwellers waiting to go inside, to see what possessions survived the fire, and merchants hawking replacements in anticipation. He pulled up alongside an ogre selling "ever-burning" oil lamps without a hint of embarrassment, and asked what had become of things.

"They got most everyone out, they say. The fire mostly did up the Keep."

It was true: the greater Hold was charred but standing, the upper reaches fully intact. The Stoop, someone said, was mostly in ruin, as were many of the wooden additions that had grown through the base of the structure over the years. The skeleton of the Hold remained, save for the Keep, which had all but collapsed.

"They could snuff everything in the Hold before dawn, but couldn't save the Keep?" He'd rejoined her under a shaded awning to share some cactus fruit she'd bought or lifted. She chewed in an exhausted way and kept running fingers through her hair.

"I can taste it," she said.

"Truly?"

"A little."

She'd come across a bright orange ribbon somewhere among the rubble and had tied it around the middle of her left tusk.

At last they saw Cooper come out of the Hold, sooty as a coal-miner, foreman's pad in hand, directing guardsmen and laborers who moved around and to and from her like a horde of locusts. Already the still-hot lumber of the wreckage was being loaded into huge kodo-drawn carts and brought down the causeway to be dumped. The rover watched her and finished a fruit, stem and all.

There was a commotion from the ruins of the Keep and they saw a crowd of people gathered around the entrance. Four guardsmen bore the dusty corpse of a man with white cloth draped across his head and chest. A few people wailed and cried and Cooper went over, consoling, conferring with the sergeants.

"The Commander's been killed, the Commander's been killed—"

"Skull was stove in by a beam, they said—"

"Crushed by the roof and burned to death—"

"He died before he burned—"

"Covered in stab wounds—"

"Poisoned—"

"Drowned—"

"What does that mean for—"

Someone clattered sword against shield and an orc with a shock of red henna hair mounted the wheel of a wagon. She produced a paper and read from it. "By the stipulations of the Wartime Act, and by provisions laid out in the laws and bylaws of this station, the position of Watch Commander will be absorbed into that of the ranking representative of the station. Therefore, Major Cooper Bawn hereby absorbs the duties and obligations of the position. That is all." She stepped smartly from the wheel and marched away.

His fingers were sticky with fruit juice. "Gods."

"Quiet up."

"You were right—I was naive—"

"Shush."

Cooper came over to them, appearing altered somehow. She cocked her head at them in a languid way. "I am pleased that both of you survived last night's business unharmed."

"Likewise," he said.

"Are you quite well?" Cooper smiled graciously. "Is there anything I can get you?"

"Don't talk to him," the rover said, low down in her chest.

Cooper shot her an even more delirious smile. "My apologies. I take it there were no issues?"

"You have eyes to see."

"I do. You left no trace?"

The rover's gaze twitched towards the procession carrying the white body into the infirmary yonder. "No."

"Excellent."

"Our business is concluded."

"Fully, completely, and totally."

"Then goodbye forever."

Cooper bowed low, her onion knot nearly scraping the ground. "Don't be strangers." She turned in her clodding boots, dress billowing, and stomped back into the fray, orders flying. Quarry stone was already being brought into the yards on carts that could not have made the journey from the ravines in the north in a single morning.

They were quiet a long time, watching the activities of the Hold reconfigure themselves around the new construction. At noon a bank of clouds moved fast from the south across the sky and brought cooling mist. He pressed his hand into the crux of her elbow.

"Where next?"

"North," she said.

"There's war."

"Not everywhere."

"I know someone in Feathermoon City," he said.

She gave him a sour look. "I won't just tarry along, you know. Our contract was burnt up."

"Sure, I'll only need a protector. A guardian, if you will."

She laughed, and the bangles on her tusks wrinkled like tambourines.

Before departing he refilled his canteen and purchased a new pair of boots. Finally, he went to the doctor to thank her for the care during his time of need. On his last trek through the yards, he thought about taking a mote of rubble, for superstition's sake, but thought better of himself. When passed by Cooper and a coterie of attendants, they all fell silent. Cooper nodded, solemnly yet affably, and they went back to work.

 

\--21--

 

He met her, beneath a clear blue sky, at the base of the causeway, and they went out together on the road.

 

END


End file.
